CHAPTER II.
THE TEMPTATION OF THE JEWESS,--IN WHICH THE HISTORY PASSES FROM THE
OUTWARD TO THE INTERNAL.
It was about the very hour, almost the very moment, in which Almamen
effected his mysterious escape from the tent of the Inquisition, that the
train accompanying the litter which bore Leila, and which was composed of
some chosen soldiers of Isabel's own body-guard, after traversing the
camp, winding along that part of the mountainous defile which was in the
possession of the Spaniards, and ascending a high and steep acclivity,
halted before the gates of a strongly fortified castle renowned in the
chronicles of that memorable war. The hoarse challenge of the sentry,
the grating of jealous bars, the clanks of hoofs upon the rough pavement
of the courts, and the streaming glare of torches--falling upon stern and
bearded visages, and imparting a ruddier glow to the moonlit buttresses
and battlements of the fortress--aroused Leila from a kind of torpor
rather than sleep, in which the fatigue and excitement of the day had
steeped her senses. An old seneschal conducted her, through vast and
gloomy halls (how unlike the brilliant chambers and fantastic arcades of
her Moorish home) to a huge Gothic apartment, hung with the arras of
Flemish looms. In a few moments, maidens, hastily aroused from slumber,
grouped around her with a respect which would certainly not have been
accorded had her birth and creed been known. They gazed with surprise at
her extraordinary beauty and foreign garb, and evidently considered the
new guest a welcome addition to the scanty society of the castle. Under
any other circumstances, the strangeness of all she saw, and the frowning
gloom of the chamber to which she was consigned, would have damped the
spirits of one whose destiny had so suddenly passed from the deepest
quiet into the sternest excitement. But any change was a relief to the
roar of the camp, the addresses of the prince, and the ominous voice and
countenance of Torquemada; and Leila looked around her, with the feeling
that the queen's promise was fulfilled, and that she was already amidst
the blessings of shelter and repose. It was long, however, before sleep
revisited her eyelids, and when she woke the noonday sun streamed broadly
through the lattice. By the bedside sat a matron advanced in years, but
of a mild and prepossessing countenance, which only borrowed a yet more
attractive charm from an expression of placid and habitual melancholy.
She was robed in black; but the rich pearls that were interwoven in the
sleeves and stomacher, the jewelled cross that was appended from a chain
of massive gold, and, still more, a certain air of dignity and command,--
bespoke, even to the inexperienced eye of Leila, the evidence of superior
station.
"Thou hast slept late, daughter," said the lady, with a benevolent smile;
"may thy slumbers have refreshed thee! Accept my regrets that I knew not
till this morning of thine arrival, or I should have been the first to
welcome the charge of my royal mistress."
There was in the look, much more than in the words of the Donna Inez de
Quexada, a soothing and tender interest that was as balm to the heart of
Leila; in truth, she had been made the guest of, perhaps, the only lady
in Spain, of pure and Christian blood, who did not despise or execrate
the name of Leila's tribe. Donna Inez had herself contracted to a Jew a
debt of gratitude which she had sought to return to the whole race. Many
years before the time in which our tale is cast, her husband and herself
had been sojourning at Naples, then closely connected with the politics
of Spain, upon an important state mission. They had then an only son, a
youth of a wild and desultory character, whom the spirit of adventure
allured to the East. In one of those sultry lands the young Quexada was
saved from the hands of robbers by the caravanserai of a wealthy
traveller. With this stranger he contracted that intimacy which
wandering and romantic men often conceive for each other, without any
other sympathy than that of the same pursuits. Subsequently, he
discovered that his companion was of the Jewish faith; and, with the
usual prejudice of his birth and time, recoiled from the friendship he
had solicited, and shrank from the sense of the obligation he had
incurred he--quitted his companion. Wearied, at length, with travel, he
was journeying homeward, when he was seized with a sudden and virulent
fever, mistaken for plague: all fled from the contagion of the supposed
pestilence--he was left to die. One man discovered his condition--
watched, tended, and, skilled in the deeper secrets of the healing art,
restored him to life and health: it was the same Jew who had preserved
him from the robbers. At this second and more inestimable obligation the
prejudices of the Spaniard vanished: he formed a deep and grateful
attachment for his preserver; they lived together for some time, and the
Israelite finally accompanied the young Quexada to Naples. Inez retained
a lively sense of the service rendered to her only son, and the
impression had been increased not only by the appearance of the
Israelite, which, dignified and stately, bore no likeness to the cringing
servility of his brethren, but also by the singular beauty and gentle
deportment of his then newly-wed bride, whom he had wooed and won in that
holy land, sacred equally to the faith of Christian and of Jew. The
young Quexada did not long survive his return: his constitution was
broken by long travel, and the debility that followed his fierce disease.
On his deathbed he had besought the mother whom he left childless, and
whose Catholic prejudices were less stubborn than those of his sire,
never to forget the services a Jew had conferred upon him; to make the
sole recompense in her power--the sole recompense the Jew himself had
demanded--and to lose no occasion to soothe or mitigate the miseries to
which the bigotry of the time often exposed the oppressed race of his
deliverer. Donna Inez had faithfully kept the promise she gave to the
last scion of her house; and, through the power and reputation of her
husband and her own connections, and still more through an early
friendship with the queen, she had, on her return to Spain, been enabled
to ward off many a persecution, and many a charge on false pretences, to
which the wealth of some son of Israel made the cause, while his faith
made the pretext. Yet, with all the natural feelings of a rigid
Catholic, she had earnestly sought to render the favor she had thus
obtained amongst the Jews minister to her pious zeal for their more than
temporal welfare. She had endeavored, by gentle means, to make the
conversions which force was impotent to effect; and, in some instances,
her success had been signal. The good senora had thus obtained high
renown for sanctity; and Isabel thought rightly that she could not select
a protectress for Leila who would more kindly shelter her youth, or more
strenuously labor for her salvation. It was, indeed, a dangerous
situation for the adherence of the maiden to that faith which it had cost
her fiery father so many sacrifices to preserve and to advance.
It was by little and little that Donna Inez sought rather to undermine
than to storm the mental fortress she hoped to man with spiritual allies;
and, in her frequent conversation with Leila, she was at once perplexed
and astonished by the simple and sublime nature of the belief upon which
she waged war. For whether it was that, in his desire to preserve Leila
as much as possible from contact even with Jews themselves, whose general
character (vitiated by the oppression which engendered meanness, and the
extortion which fostered avarice) Almamen regarded with lofty though
concealed repugnance; or whether it was, that his philosophy did not
interpret the Jewish formula of belief in the same spirit as the herd,--
the religion inculcated in the breast of Leila was different from that
which Inez had ever before encountered amongst her proselytes. It was
less mundane and material--a kind of passionate rather than metaphysical
theism, which invested the great ONE, indeed, with many human sympathies
and attributes, but still left Him the August and awful God of the
Genesis, the Father of a Universe though the individual Protector of a
fallen sect. Her attention had been less directed to whatever appears,
to a superficial gaze, stern and inexorable in the character of the
Hebrew God, and which the religion of Christ so beautifully softened and
so majestically refined, than to those passages in which His love watched
over a chosen people, and His forbearance bore with their transgressions.
Her reason had been worked upon to its belief by that mysterious and
solemn agency, by which--when the whole world beside was bowed to the
worship of innumerable deities, and the adoration of graven images,--in a
small and secluded portion of earth, amongst a people far less civilised
and philosophical than many by which they were surrounded, had been alone
preserved a pure and sublime theism, disdaining a likeness in the things
of heaven or earth. Leila knew little of the more narrow and exclusive
tenets of her brethren; a Jewess in name, she was rather a deist in
belief; a deist of such a creed as Athenian schools might have taught to
the imaginative pupils of Plato, save only that too dark a shadow had
been cast over the hopes of another world. Without the absolute denial
of the Sadducee, Almamen had, probably, much of the quiet scepticism
which belonged to many sects of the early Jews, and which still clings
round the wisdom of the wisest who reject the doctrine of Revelation; and
while he had not sought to eradicate from the breast of his daughter any
of the vague desire which points to a Hereafter, he had never, at least,
directed her thoughts or aspirations to that solemn future. Nor in the
sacred book which was given to her survey, and which so rigidly upheld
the unity of the Supreme Power, was there that positive and unequivocal
assurance of life beyond "the grave where all things are forgotten," that
might supply the deficiencies of her mortal instructor. Perhaps, sharing
those notions of the different value of the sexes, prevalent, from the
remotest period, in his beloved and ancestral East, Almamen might have
hopes for himself which did not extend to his child. And thus she grew
up, with all the beautiful faculties of the soul cherished and unfolded,
without thought, without more than dim and shadowy conjectures, of the
Eternal Bourne to which the sorrowing pilgrim of the earth is bound. It
was on this point that the quick eye of Donna Inez discovered her faith
was vulnerable: who would not, if belief were voluntary, believe in the
world to come? Leila's curiosity and interest were aroused: she
willingly listened to her new guide--she willingly inclined to
conclusions pressed upon her, not with menace, but persuasion. Free from
the stubborn associations, the sectarian prejudices, and unversed in the
peculiar traditions and accounts of the learned of her race, she found
nothing to shock her in the volume which seemed but a continuation of the
elder writings of her faith. The sufferings of the Messiah, His sublime
purity, His meek forgiveness, spoke to her woman's heart; His doctrines
elevated, while they charmed, her reason: and in the Heaven that a Divine
hand opened to all,--the humble as the proud, the oppressed as the
oppressor, to the woman as to the lords of the earth,--she found a haven
for all the doubts she had known, and for the despair which of late had
darkened the face of earth. Her home lost, the deep and beautiful love
of her youth blighted,--that was a creed almost irresistible which told
her that grief was but for a day, that happiness was eternal. Far, too,
from revolting such of the Hebrew pride of association as she had formed,
the birth of the Messiah in the land of the Israelites seemed to
consummate their peculiar triumph as the Elected of Jehovah. And while
she mourned for the Jews who persecuted the Saviour, she gloried in those
whose belief had carried the name and worship of the descendants of David
over the furthest regions of the world. Often she perplexed and startled
the worthy Inez by exclaiming, "This, your belief, is the same as mine,
adding only the assurance of immortal life--Christianity is but the
Revelation of Judaism."
The wise and gentle instrument of Leila's conversion did not, however,
give vent to those more Catholic sentiments which might have scared away
the wings of the descending dove. She forbore too vehemently to point
out the distinctions of the several creeds, and rather suffered them to
melt insensibly one into the other: Leila was a Christian, while she
still believed herself a Jewess. But in the fond and lovely weakness of
mortal emotions, there was one bitter thought that often and often came
to mar the peace that otherwise would have settled on her soul. That
father, the sole softener of whose stern heart and mysterious fates she
was, with what pangs would he receive the news of her conversion! And
Muza, that bright and hero-vision of her youth--was she not setting the
last seal of separation upon all hope of union with the idol of the
Moors? But, alas! was she not already separated from him, and had not
their faiths been from the first at variance? From these thoughts she
started with sighs and tears; and before her stood the crucifix already
admitted into her chamber, and--not, perhaps, too wisely--banished so
rigidly from the oratories of the Huguenot. For the representation of
that Divine resignation, that mortal agony, that miraculous sacrifice,
what eloquence it hath for our sorrows! what preaching hath the symbol
to the vanities of our wishes, to the yearnings of our discontent!
By degrees, as her new faith grew confirmed, Leila now inclined herself
earnestly to those pictures of the sanctity and calm of the conventual
life which Inez delighted to draw. In the reaction of her thoughts, and
her despondency of all worldly happiness, there seemed, to the young
maiden, an inexpressible charm in a solitude which was to release her for
ever from human love, and render her entirely up to sacred visions and
imperishable hopes. And with this selfish, there mingled a generous and
sublime sentiment. The prayers of a convert might be heard in favour of
those yet benighted: and the awful curse upon her outcast race be
lightened by the orisons of one humble heart. In all ages, in all
creeds, a strange and mystic impression has existed of the efficacy of
self-sacrifice in working the redemption even of a whole people: this
belief, so strong in the old orient and classic religions, was yet more
confirmed by Christianity--a creed founded upon the grandest of historic
sacrifices; and the lofty doctrine of which, rightly understood,
perpetuates in the heart of every believer the duty of self-immolation,
as well as faith in the power of prayer, no matter how great the object,
how mean the supplicator. On these thoughts Leila meditated, till
thoughts acquired the intensity of passions, and the conversion of the
Jewess was completed.
